But hey, wait a minute, Doctor Aphra! Are you really wearin' a crop top befitting your position as Darth Vader's chauffeur and general all-around gopher? Let's turn a few pages and look at a couple more panels:

So, I'm guessing the first panel was just a coloring mistake instead of Aphra flaunting her Force-toned abs. Still: skin-tight t-shirts of the Star Wars Universe.

I have been informed that a certain Little Stuffed Bull has sorted out his computer woes and is planning his triumphant return, so it is time for me to bid you all adieu.

Before I trudge on back to Armagideon Time, I would like to thank Bully and his pal John for graciously allowing me to serve as this site's guest host.

I had a lot of fun doing it, and that's important. Comics -- like any endeavor involving human beings and money changing hands -- can get pretty icky at times, and those highly visible negative aspects can overshadow what is a pretty amazing medium full of all sorts of talented folks doing incredible work.

Origin: Got dipped in his poker-loving pa's experimental "Zero Fluid." (Also, his mom turned out to be a space alien.)

Powers: Flight, blasty-hands, super-strength, damage resistance.

Costume: What happens when a Bicycle deck face card joins the SCA.

Archvillain: Hemlock, the assassin who wields heat-seeking explosive garden trowels. (As well as any penciller, inker, or colorist who had to deal with the character.)

Current status: Man, Phase 7 on the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going to be SO RAD.

All kidding aside, I love both these exercises in over-complicated garishness with equal measure. They were the lurid, overwrought products of a lurid, overwrought period in comics history -- one that just so happened to coincide with my childhood obsession with all things gaudy and superheroic. Their confusing powersets and convoluted origins informed my own early attempts at creating superheroes, where "too much" was "never enough" and there was always room for a bit of contra-fashionable flair.

Look, any schmoe can come up with "noble alien champion" or "spider-powered teenager." A truly imaginative child of the late 1970s would never settle for anything less than "um, he's a robot who is also part alien and the son of Zeus and he can fly and spit fire and lift a billion tons and his name is 'Mega-PowerMaster King.'"

Chuckle all you want. My mom said I was "very creative" when she hung the sketch on the family fridge.

Seriously, though: When I embarked on my Great Back Issue Buying Binge during the mid-1990s, Firestorm and Jack of Hearts appearances filled the top half of my wish list. They might be goofy, but it's a goofiness that cuts right to the nostalgic core of my comics fandom.

Howdy, folks! This is your special guest host Andrew Otis Weiss, here to disprove my fun-hating reputation by taking a look at another funnybook character I truly and sincerely love.

This particular fella comes from the dawn of the Golden Age of Superheroes, back when "a dude who can fly" was a bankable concept in and of itself. If you had that angle locked down, you really didn't need extraneous clutter...

...which in the Black Condor's case included "pants" and "a shirt."

Condor's minimalist choice of fighting togs can be traced back to the character's origins as an avian-themed riff on Tarzan's pulp adventures. After his archaeologist parents were slain by bandits, the infant mystery-man-to-be was taken in and raised by a colony of "intelligent" condors.

There the young man learned the language, mysteries, and (presumably) carrion-munching ways of his feathered foster brethren. Getting the hang of flying was a little bit trickier...

...but nothing that a few panels and some heavy suspension of disbelief couldn't solve.

Once that was sorted, it only took a little anti-bandit payback, an encounter with a kindly monk, and the assumption of a dead senator's identity to get him back to America and battling Ratzis and gangsters on a monthly basis.

Since those heady logic-optional times, Black Condor has undergone multiple minor retcons and spun off a pair of legacy characters -- all adding additional baggage and superfluous explanations to what was a delightfully uncomplicated concept.

I first encountered the character during the "Crisis on Earth-X" arc in All-Star Squadron, where Roy Thomas and Rick Hoberg attempted to flesh-out the backstory of the Quality Comics alt-corner of DC's multiverse (while offing the Red Bee in the process). I've since read through Condor's Eisner/Fine-helmed adventures in Crack Comics, which are pretty amazing -- like so many early Golden Age superhero features -- for witnessing the foundations of the genre get hashed out in real-time.

Honestly, though, no story the Black Condor has appeared in can match the Jerry Ordway illustration of that Who's Who entry above. It perfectly captures the square-jawed, high concept essence of the character in all his elegant pulp-inflected simplicity...